elluminea

If not DPS talents they'd be things like mana conservation or pointless utility spells and we'd back at the need to put points into talents that never get playtime, like 2/47/11+1 was in frost. I appreciated icy veins but I could have assigned points 4 through 10 in the frost tree using a dartboard and had an equal impact on my spec. As we've seen, even if such tier 1 talents weren't there but tier 3 had something great we'd still spec into it to min-max, at least this is giving us something along the way to be happy about using.

I think this would be a very positive change. Seeing how Missile Barrage works its way into PvE, hot streak feels clumsy by comparison, not to mention how bland it makes fingers of frost feel (from a PvE standpoint). I could see hot streak becoming a stacked buff which you would be able to 'spend' 2 of when you wanted (or more, considering the increased reliability). It would need a duration by charge, so you couldn't roll it until execute range and then unload insta pyros the rest of the fight, or maybe have a maximum stack size but a rolling duration. 3 would probably work well with combustion, you'd know when your combustion was done you'd have a pyro waiting to go, and combustion would be over so it's not as though the pyro is guaranteed to be buffed to high heaven. Maybe I'm off on this assessment due to my hatred of the RNG, but streaky performance due to crits is already prevalent, I'd think a design of this nature would be more along the lines of their recent "bring players with skill over players with shadowbolt" mantra.

 

Wintersbane

There was a thread on the official wow forums about changing hot streak to be more predictable or usable in pvp and the change that I suggested was to change it to having scorch,fireblast, fireball, and ffb crits give you a buff that decreases the cast time of your next pyro by 33% (stacks up to 3 times). This would allow you to be able to use the shorter cast pyro if you ever needed it, even if it wasn't stacked up all the way.

Also, reading through the last page and the ideas to change combustion or something to a new spamable instant for fire gave me this idea. "Combustion - x mana, 3-5 sec cooldown - Does (something - something else) fire damage to the target, in addition, if the target currently is under the effect of Ignite, Combustion stuns the target and is a guaranteed crit."

 

◊ manly

Why change Hot Streak when its perfectly fine ?

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Jonny_Monroe

Hot streak is fine, all DPS classes are just going to have to get used to paying attention to procs now and fire mages aren't immune to that.

As for 'dump talents' now (I believe the discussion talked expressly about early frost, but this applies to all trees): I would rather have talent trees where your functional DPS can be found from 20-30 points in a tree fairly evenly spread out, and all the other talents are filler. What this would encourage is more uniqueness in specs as players don't feel obligated to follow the strict templates when they know that 30+ of their investment can go wherever they want in a tree without impacting those essential 20-30 DPS points. To use the frost example above; You say those early frost talents could go anywhere and it wouldn't matter; but those talents are going to be one of the few things that separate you from another mage building on the same template. If you could apply that to the entire frost tree then what you end up with is 2 mages on wildly different specs that can give the same performance on a patchwerk fight but differ vastly as other circumstances are introduced to a fight, or differ even further on PvP or just good ol' grinding.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Xentropy

Thottbot's spell data says it has a 1.5 second GCD.
Pyro Rocket - Thottbot: World of Warcraft

As in, the standard, puts everything on cooldown. Losing 1.5s of dps time to use it makes it worse than no enchant at all by my math, though I didn't do the numbers to determine that assuming it worked with Fire talents and spellpower...if it does it may be worthwhile, as you say (a longer range fire blast of sorts). As for the haste, you'd have to consider stacking worth quite a bit to bring it up to the level of the spellpower enchant; that's why I called it useless. It does have one minor use, though: A cheap way to enchant your own leveling gloves until you get an epic worth spending gold to put a REAL enchant on.

When I read you feel we're all fine, I figured you were of the "we only need one valid spec" camp and provided every raider is (Frost)Fire we are, indeed, fine. But then you mentioned Fire's PvP could use improvement, which is true but should mean you at least somewhat share the dream of every spec being somewhat valid in each area of the game. Do you really believe, then, that Frost being so far behind on dps in PvE is okay and needs no improvement? (There's little doubt it's further behind than it was in TBC; just how much further is debatable, but TBC's gap was enough to kill Frost for raiding.) I really have no idea where Ghostcrawler's, "Frost's dps is already high," is coming from. As Roywyn said, the math and parses out of beta just don't add up.

 

◊ manly

If you make frost dps 'the same' as fire on 5-6 min fights, then you make deep frost the de-facto raiding spec because under short fights frost will always win, and on long fights they are the same. Not to mention the WE regen utility. This is also why you can't really expect arcane to do as much as deep fire for sustained no-movement fights. Truth is, just as much as people want arcane to have solid mobile dps, the same mages need to understand that its an equally valid request to ask for deep fire to have higher single target dps (higher in the sense that the spec has higher than the competing spec -- this is in no way me trying to say fire needs buffs -- it really doesnt).

I don't advocate for any spec to be better than the other. In fact, I don't really care where the cards fall, just as long as I don't get sidelined in raids due to poor scaling I'm pretty much fine with any change. With this said, the mana situation has been frustrating for as long as I can remember. Even back in MC I distinctively recall having to sit and drink between every pull and tell people to pull slower. It definitely hasn't changed one bit. That is, despise the mana gems being added in the game, despise evocation being trained, despise mana regen from my raid group, and despise mana potions/resto drums (seriously, few used mana potions back in MC ?). But despise this naggling gripe, its playable. I won't lie that the main reason I was playing far more my alt than my main was due to that. This is just how much I hate having to sit out on pulls because my mana doesn't allow for me to chain pull. I do play extremely recklessly and without attempting to maximize DPM, but regardless it never felt 'quite right'. I am sure many will agree to that. It really depends on how your raid group does the pulls, but if you barely have any time out of combat between pulls you will know what I mean. And drinking during a pull is unacceptable as far as I'm concerned.

So with all of this said, to me its not about having just one valid build. In fact, I don't know where you got that from. I mentioned fire pvp because to me its beyond hopeless. I'd much rather have fire never work in pvp if it means it can stay as it is in pve. Doing the changes required to make fire 'work' (under my own definition of 'making work' I listed earlier) would cost fire severely in pve in all likelyness. Its more a matter of being fair. See, you get frustrated that frost is behind in pve. If I want to be fair I need to point out that fire is far far behind frost in pvp, much more than frost is behind fire in pve. Its not stuff I actually look forward -- its a design decision about how fire is meant to work that will somewhat inevitably lead to fire never functioning in pvp. Somewhat in the same veins, frost has that 'problem' too for pve. But thats looking exclusively at dps and scaling, ignoring alltogether the intangibles.

So no, I don't really look forward to have 'one spec' work in PVE. Even if they all work, I will end up using just one anyway. I have been arguing now for a long time that there is no way to properly compare the intangibles between specs, and that WWS mostly is good as an object reference that a player can use to build a better personal opinion of what works best for him. But I would never advocate to go further than that. Personally I vaguely pass over WWS parses, but I can't conclude anything from them. Maybe if I see 50+ parses being very very good for one spec on one specific fight I might come and agree that that is meaningfull data. However, until you get to that point its just noise, and nothing else. Personally I value greatly intangibles, and you need to measure WWS parses against those, so you need to take the boss encounter mechanics into account as a result (vs intangibles). Fire happens to best fit my ideology as a player, and it isn't something that is likely to change anytime soon. However, as a player I realize that my ideologically-inclined build lacks severely in many departments -- there are many intangibles that works against my own valuation of the spec as a whole. In particular, I have always had a great distaste against delayed damage (ignites, living bomb) because it really goes against you for low hp mobs. My all encompassing 'play flexibility' intangible is the one I personally value most, and right now its arcane that wins at that. So with all of this said, I still believe just as much as I always did when I hear complaints about other specs comparing to deep fire single target dps. I do expect other specs to be behind in the one perk of the fire spec. The difference is that we don't agree on the 'how much' its meant to be behind. I believe both our opinion on the matter is superfluous at best, but I'll just say that if I were in the design team, the goal would probably gravitate towards frost being 7-8% behind fire on single-target no movement 5-6min fight, and frost beating fire by an equal amount for the sub-2:30 scenario. Then all of this would vastly swing and become an impossible comparison when adding more intangibles, such as movements, ramp-up times, etc. I do strongly believe that giving any kind of figure like faxmonkey does, about frost being '30% behind fire' is laughable at best. Nobody will ever agree on any scenario. If nobody agrees on a scenario, then there is no possible way to compare one spec to another. Then if you come to those numbers by looking at wws, well I somewhat expect people to look exclusively at the top parse and ignore things like a mage being specced fiery payback and having 66% crit rates. Fire dps is more RNG due to its crit multiplier, compare consequently. If using TC tools rather than WWS parses to compare specs then you get a whole slew of other issues doing the comparison, namely, the defined scenario will, by definition, favor one spec or another. It will also ignore many many intangibles.

So again, I don't disagree that things are looking somewhat grim for non fire specs so far. However, you can't boil down every spec comparison into a one-size-fits-all comparison and conclude to something. Just for example, as I said earlier, if you make frost do equal dps as fire on 5 min fight, then frost will win on shorter fights, and on movement fights. In that respect, dps is balanced based upon those many intangibles. And this is what it all boils down to. I don't think neither of us will ever be able to properly judge how much are intangibles meant to be valued at, and it is in blizzard best interest not to let us know too. As such we will eternally disagree on the 'how much'. It doesn't means I think frost is fine, or that arcane is fine. I know something is wrong. Its just I cant give any good recommendation since I don't even know myself where I want the end result to look like.

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arch

Because of the RNG you were refering to yourself?

And we all know, both from Ghostwcrawler and Roywyns findings, that Hot Streak makes fire dps very variable.

But I'm not gonna complain. The current hot streak may be RNGish from time to time, but it is still a very forgiving proc.

 

Xentropy

Thank you for your clarification there. I understand where you are coming from, but I don't believe single-target dps is something that can be given to one spec as a niche benefit, because if you do, that will become the only viable spec. We saw it in TBC with Frost only 5% behind. Boss fights that last under 2.5 minutes are extremely rare, so a bonus there really isn't worth a penalty in the other 95% of encounters. Additionally, with the addition of dual specs, if one spec is ahead by even 2% at single-target fights that last 6 minutes, everyone will need to be that spec because it's just, to raid leaders, a matter of pressing your "cookie-cutter" button then pull.

The pros and cons of each spec for any dps-only class need to be placed in something other than single-target dps. If any one spec gets single-target dps as their "bonus", they become the only spec. This isn't just my opinion, it's what the entire community has been doing for the past two years. Frost mages in raids were pretty much limited to low-progression guilds, and rightly so. Now that Frost is even MORE than 5% behind, it'll just continue, if not get worse.

So what should Fire get if Arcane and Frost get equal single-target sustained dps? I don't know. That's something that could be discussed. What "intangibles" would you find attractive? Frost gets stronger burst for shorter fights. Arcane gets to lose less dps in mobility fights. Perhaps Fire should have the strongest AoE? Right now Blizzard is frankly insane, and I really don't agree with Frost having best AoE along with best mid-term burst. Blizzard already has a TON of slowing power and is a strong spell in its own right, giving it max dps as well is overdoing things. I say this even as a Frost junkie--yes, basically I just said nerf me, as long as I gain single-target dps to make up for loss of AoE. If AoE isn't a good enough perk for Fire, what would be? Something OTHER THAN single-target sustained dps, because a Deuce-of-DPS will trump an Ace-of-Any-Intangible any day of the week.

 

Minifridge

I agree with Manly, Hot Streak is fine. Yeah, it's RNG -- so is everything else in this game. It gives Fire Mages a reason to value crit again. As for the PvP aspect, most will agree that fire is quite an undesirable tree when it comes to PvP, so that's kind of an irrelevant arguement.

 

◊ manly

The core core issue I was referring to is fire dps being balanced around its crits. When you see 280% fireball crits and even higher FFB crits, you know for a fact that you need to crit to do the dps youre meant to do. Resilience is a protection against the basic building blocks of the spec. Resilience does nothing vs snares. What I mean by that is that frost dps is balanced with the snare penalty somewhat being up there somewhere (and no I'm not talking about the 5% legacy penalty on frostbolt). But resilience doesn't affect that part of frost. Try to think of it like 'fire has no snares, but instead of snares you get huge crits'. (and no, this isn't me trying to imply that removing snares on frostbolt means you should be allowed bigger crits, but I'm sure you know what I mean).

So that was the core issue I was talking about. Hot Streak is like a very very minor detail in comparison. The problem is, if fire dps is balanced right now the way blizzards wants it to be, its in their best interest to not change a damn thing. And I think Hot Streak is somewhat workable in pvp, although clearly not as good as in PVE. What really matters here is this: 'is Hot Streak a talent worth taking for PVP purpose ?'. If the answer is yes, then you probably shouldn't introduce any 'fixes' to it. If the talent isn't worth taking, then you might consider a change.

So yes, I pointed out Hot Streak, but that wasn't the core issue I meant to talk about.

Alright. I'll try and imagine for a second I don't believe in what I said earlier and I was gueninely attempting to follow that school of thought.

As you pointed out yourself, ironically, fire is not the master of aoe. Really not. In fact, I found out th hard way that yes blastwave is unusable. And I always deeply hated dragon's breath due to its extremely narrow cone. So I always did my best to avoid using DB at all. That leaves 3s flamestrikes nobody wants to cast. Then fire gets Living Bomb, problem is, it doesn't blow up when the mob dies, and most pulls right now die before 12s is even up. And come the expansion, I expect 1 LB per trash wave, not 2. so its looking fairly grim. In the other hand, they buffed arcane explosion range greatly. And blizzard crits and stuff. So yes it clearly makes no sense there, but its ok theres a lot of things that don't make sense anyway. I long accepted that fire spec was total garbage for trash, its lack in the aoe department is just another one on the list of failures.

Theres another reason for frost to be behind fire in wotlk. Imp. WE. Oh, lets make it clear now that its not meant to much behind. Maybe 1% behind, at most. But it was somewhat something I expected (that frost ends up more behind than before).

Lets say as you proposed that intangibles should affect only non-dpsing stuff. If every spec has equal dps, then a few things will stand out to change the numbers, even though they are all unrelated with dps. For example;

cooldowns / burst dps
mobility
ramp-up times (scorch/winter's chill, ab stack, etc.)
aoe
survivability
sustenance (dpm / mana longevity)
pushback resistance

And a few more I definitely forgot. You see, if you make the dps equal for all 3 specs, then your intangibles will make arcane win over all specs since it has the most play flexibility of any spec. (flexibility is a conglomerate intangible as far as I'm conserned; roughly defined by the adaptability of the spec on any context that is being thrown at it). Arcane wouldn't win in the aoe department, but it would win for everything else.

You want to tell me all specs should have the same dps ? I agree. Where we don't agree is that I believe that dps needs to be balanced against intangibles because if you don't then the intangibles end up affecting your dps.

Let me try and give you a different context. It really is the same thing in the end.

Take any fight. Any one of them. Do you expect rogues to top the meters on 100% of the fights ? Because this is what this is about. Every class dps position will be affected by intangibles from fight to fight. And this is why it is equally absurd to compare one spec dps versus another -- for the same reason you would cautiously compare one class vs another -- the scenario would totally change the numbers around.

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◊ manly

Since you asked:
the intangible I value most is 'adaptability/flexibility'. But it is somewhat disingenious to say its the one I value most, because it is a conglomerate intangible. It somewhat represents many sub-intangibles into one big clump. Being able to best adapt on any scenarios at all, I think, makes up for ideologically the strongest build possible. Problem is, as I pointed out in the past, the only way to do proper balance is through specialization. What this means is that you need to give up something in order to be good at something else. Try to picture the following, since it illustrates well my view of 'balance'. Imagine you have 10$. Your spec can spend 10$ total, in whatever way it wants to. You can buy intangibles with that money, and all of those intangibles are granular in the sense that you can buy 0.20$ worth of aoe dps. There are many things you can buy, but you cannot spend more than 10$ total. If every spec is allowed to spend 10$ total, then theres your balance. The important point here being: if you want 8$ worth of 'mobility', then you can't have more than 2$ worth spread across all the rest. You need to give up something in order to be good in one domain. You need to specialize.

Yes of course, everyone will agree that single target dps will rule the day in PVE for possibly forever. But single target dps is affected by those very intangibles. The spreadsheet tells you chain-heal spamming is optimum hps ? Then spec for max chain heal throughtput. Then you fall on a boss where you can't chain heal, and all your paradigm falls down on its knees.

You say you want intangibles to compare head to head rather than involve dps. Sure, I'm all for it. Its 100% ok with my definition of balance. Problem is, to do that would require redoing over all specs. Fully. Imagine each of the intangibles have a value between 1 and 10 you can spend on, and that you have 100 pts to spend per spec (this isn't about specs, more about how to balance specs). How you spend those points affects all the talents and the spells available. For example, if you decide that frost has '6' in mobility, that means you need to create a way that the frost talents can do some mobility dps, but not too much either. It affects how spells works. For example, that '6' would have bought you ice lance, WE, and brain freeze. Fire went with a '3-4' for mobility. As as result that bought you fireblast, and stuff on long cooldowns (LB, hot streak, blastwave, DB). Now comes the problem. I fully agree with you that its roughly how it should work. However, the talents and spells are already done, and unlikely to change. Whatever way things were balanced for the end result is there, and since the mechanics of spells are unlikely to change (and that indirectly their 'points' you spent on it balance-wise), that means you constrained your model in such a way that in order to balance for single target dps would mean scrape off that balancing work. What I am saying here is, what I believe is, if you want single target dps to increase, then you need to modify talents and mechanics, not just the multipliers. Because ultimately things were balanced with the intangible costs in mind. It doesn't means they had it right, or that the AOE divide makes sense, or that TTW makes sense, or that fiery payback makes sense or that the dps is proper.

At least I do think we are in the right path if were starting to talk about making compromises. You want better dps ? Specialize. You lose some, you gain some. I do think that if nothing were to be changed on the current talents (and spell mechanics), frost ought to be between 4-7% within deep fire on single target dps 5-6min fights. To be clear -- the difference is vast, but this is also the main perk of fire spec (that scenario specifically). That number would tremendously tank down for most other scenarios. Frost would win on sub-3min fight. It would win on aoe. The number would be severely less in other scenarios. But again, I compare the top of the line fire spec, with 3/3 world in flames and absolutely every sacrifice made to have only top single target dps. Keep in mind this is mostly a figurative number -- as I said I don't know what I'd want it to be.

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Maje

On another note

3) What's going on with Spirit? It's still a throw away stat.
Strength is a throw away stat. Spirit benefits you, just not as much as you'd like. We're talking a lot about all of the "converts one stat into another talents." Many of those were implemented to solve problems with different specs sharing gear. We're not sure we want to go down the road of providing talents to convert every second tier stat into a primary stat. That list would get long.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - [Mage] Status Update Please?

Spirit has less value then it did in BC days, I don't mind having throwaway stats I just mind having them on my tier gear.

 

Light4

On the upside, I noted that Arcane Potency remains, even if clearcast fades due to not being used...

On a side note: Would it be in principle possible to cast 2 spells under A.Potency (like AB,ABar) if lag plays an issue?

 

Jonny_Monroe

1) That has been the case since Potency was first introduced. If you really want to go into a fight with potency up you can hit PoM and flamestrike 0 targets beforehand. The potency buff will linger until you use it while PoM ticks away its cooldown before the start of the fight.

2) I think you can pre-cast it but I need to get on the dummies to test it. I know this resolves an issue I reported on the beta which prevented ABar/Fireball cycles from ever getting the benefit of Potency.

[Edit] The change last patch has fixed the trick I posted in 1)

On point 2: Its hard to test on target dummies because its difficult to build a reasonable sample set. Before making 1 test you first need to proc potency, then you need to hope that latency isn't eating into your attempts at a pre-cast. And even then; its not like FoF where you know for sure if you got it - you might have crit without potency.

From a mechanics stand-point I don't see why it would be coded any differently to FoF. Both are consumed on cast for an effect that is observed on hit. The difference between FoF and APot is that you can potentially benefit from a pre-casted APot without changing your cast cycle for it. Essentially, arcane might see a ~1% crit chance increase from the recent change.

OMNOMNOM.

 

Xentropy

Sorry to slice your posts up like that but I just wanted to highlight the specific points where we differ in our opinions. Basically everything else you said could've been me typing it; we both agree there are factors outside of dps that mean something.

First, I don't think the water elemental mana regen is worth anything. Not even 1%. If they're using it as an excuse to hold us back, I ask them to please remove it entirely. It's not even as valuable as a mana spring totem, which any shaman can bring without technically paying extra dps for it.

Second, the Frost spec I'm talking about desiring dps balance in IS the specialized one. The total focus on single-target dps one. No permafrost, no frostbite, no improved blizzard, maybe even no ice barrier (though honestly that one balances itself, since using it costs GCD's and thus lowers your dps--getting double taxed by losing dps when we DON'T use it is a problem). There's an issue there in that there's nowhere else for those points to go for the most part, so many frost mages will get them just because most of the choices are on the order of Permafrost vs Arcane Fortitude. No brainers. But we're WILLING to pay the price in snare utility for single-target dps, because our utility becomes useless in boss fights anyhow. Blizzard isn't even giving us that opportunity to specialize, in a way, because the options don't exist for trading utility for dps anywhere. If spell impact had improved frostbolt instead of fireball it would've made a lot more sense in this regard.

Lastly (and most lengthily), I do agree that dps should be balanced against intangibles. The issue is I don't feel imbalanced dps can *ever* work in a dps-focused class. Not in a raid setting, anyway. You say fire's strength, it's "niche", is 5-6 minute single-target dps fights. Well, that's 95% of raid bosses, right there. Some involve more movement than others, but movement is arcane's niche, not even frost's, so where does that leave frost? Only in the sub-3-minute category. And I can count the number of those in T6+ content on one finger. Akama. That's IT. (During progression, of course, not after it's been nerfed to hell; once a boss is on farm, and especially with this 30% health nerf, of COURSE fights are fast, and spec hardly matters anyway.) When a "niche" covers not just the majority but the vast, vast majority of the entire game, it's not a niche, it's the main consideration for any spec. You can always go respec for that one fight where the other spec will come out ahead, but it's respecing to "the other spec" that only works some of the time from "the main spec" that works all the rest of the time. My strong belief is that every spec should work equally in the majority-content.

However, and this is where we differ but only in a very slight way--I believe the intangibles need to be balanced around the dps, not the other way around. If fire has less intangible benefits, you don't buff fire's dps to compensate, you buff its intangibles. Hell, here's one thing that "feels" like an Arcane talent but would fit great as an addition to one of the deep Fire talents: Eliminate Evocation's cooldown, just for deep Fire. Suddenly Fire gains a PvP niche (outlast) and its PvE mana issues are fixed entirely, and it gains its own "identity", the ability to dps forever. Now its niche is 10 minute or longer fights, and mana drain fights. There aren't many, you say? Well, there aren't many sub-3-minute fights either, really, so why is that worth dropping Frost's dps for?

Perhaps the bottom line issue is fights are all too similar. They all last approximately the same length of time, and they all have stuff you're not supposed to stand in, or periods of time where you spread out followed by periods of stacking or whatever. It's hard for any spec to survive when it's built around paying a price in the majority content for a bonus in content that comes along as one fight per tier. It's just not worth BEING that spec, except for during that one fight. So my feeling is that we should all be equal in the majority content, and no one should have a "niche bonus" in 6 minute single-target fights, because that's not a niche, it's the primary raiding game. And fire's balance shouldn't come from increased power 95% of the time, but more of whatever it is Frost and Arcane have in that other 5%, its own real niche other than simple dps.

Basically, you're saying the scenario will change the dps balance. And I completely agree. The problem is well over 75% of the time there is one particular scenario in play. Fights in the 5-7 minute length range with minimal to moderate movement. So to imbalance specs in the majority scenario will just result in the best spec for that one particular scenario being the "main" spec, and specs that do best in scenarios that hardly ever come along get to be "off-spec". I'd rather give Fire its own "off-spec" specialty and bring the other two trees up to par in the "main" content.

 

Gediablo

I keep reading that both fire and frost got better AoE than arcane now, and I feel I have to comment on that. Looking at the theorycraft numbers only I agree, but when actually AoEing I disagree. Since 3.0.2 my guild stopped using any form of CC in raids (I don't even have polymorph in my bars anymore) and just AoE every pull - both in SW main raids and our MH&BT raids with alts.

The knockback-nerf to blastwave usually makes the skill a big no-no - but flamestrike, DB, instant flamestrike, blastwave, instant flamestrike does give a nice burst AoE (this actually gave me the best AoE result in 5 man WotLK heroics), but you are very likely to pull aggro doing so and targetting can be a problem. Blizzard is very high dps, but you need frostbite (which tends to kill melee) for it to work properly with FoF and aggro can be a problem too. Flamestrike, AE spam, PoM->Flamestrike to me seems to me in raids to be both bulletproof safe, not too restricted by aggro, stationary channeling, mobs running loose a bit or negative effects like knockbacks and frostbites. Having tried all 3 styles of AoEing I know I can get higher burst dps in raids AoEing as frost or fire, but in my eyes I both do more damage and have a lower risk of dying as arcane while AoEing.

The counter argument here would probably be that our tanks suck at aggro, but I don't believe they do. If you can't pull aggro from your tanks with frost or fire AoE you probably wait slightly longer starting the AoE, than an arcane mage have to, and most AoE pulls are over really fast. But don't take my word for it - try it out yourself and compare your AoE damage to the other mages in the raid.

 

Thegoodman

I disagree with this. The only real difference between Mages and other classes in PvE scaling was the amount of talents that were dedicated to DPS gains. The problem is that Mage talents just don't devote enough points to increasing our single target DPS. We are forced to choose between mana conservation, AoE, gimmick/fun, and single target dps. Often times we do not have all of those choices available to us which result in "filler" talents. Take Hunters for example. They have a difficult time deciding which DPS spec is the best because they have countless talents that contribute to their DPS gains. They simply don't have enough talent points to go around and must decide between armor penetration, more damage on their dots, more haste, more crit, more damage, larger crits, etc.... Filler talents are what has made the Mage class fall far behind and it DOES force us to use spec XYZ. If we had damage increasing options galore like other classes, we could have an infinite number of competitive specs that are all slightly different and all do slightly different damage depending on your playstyle. Instead of this we have a cookie cutter DPS spec that is go fire or go home and there is no room for movement, we even had an extra talent point to toss around and waste where ever we like.

 

Alihandras

Hot Steak is fine however I believe it's systematic use can still be improved through Blizzard's tools. If the game can calculate our crits before spell hit why do we still rely on spell hit talents? I mean any good mage at this point in the game is going to be running at least 200 haste, with a fireball that's roughly 2.6secs on your cast time. Ok if your standing max range and you cast fireball with combustion going it's very real to have 6 stacks of combustion and go all out at max range and cast a fireball, scorch, and fireblast and watch the triple crit due to travel time of the fireball.

Ok so with all that used as practiced proof of the fact that crit is calculated before you hit, but rather on cast, why can't blizzard make this proc on spell cast instead of hit. I mean if i'm casting 2 in a row that crit I'm about 3/4's of the way through my 3rd fireball when I recieve the proc, and due to latency am usually on my way to cut casting my 4th fireball meaing I'm not seeing my useage of my Hot Steak until 4 casts later when I could potentially be wasting it.

I think that's something that should get some concern, unless I'm mistaken in my thinking with recent patches, I'm coming off a 3 month break from the game and am just now finally catching up on all the EJ threads to where I should be as well as on all the insane amounts of patch notes/blue posts. Thanks for the time, but doesn't it seem logical it should work that way?

 

Zeldyrr

The discussion between Xeno and Manly has been very interesting. So many things to quote, but I settled on the quote from Xeno, above.

While Xeno made mention to it elsewhere, but I think the discussion is way underestimating the impact of dual specs on the fly. Comments such as "ever get to come along" suggest a mage is a particular spec. They shouldn't be one particular spec--they should be two. This has a major, major impact that I don't think the mage community or GC has yet to realize.

Manly, you've suggested that fire needs to be about 5% ahead on 5-6 min fights, or else frost becomes the dominate spec. But how does dual specs affect that statement? If I have a frost raiding spec and fire raiding spec, won't I press my fire spec button on 5-6 minute fights? And if, as Xeno suggested, 80% of fights are of this length, won't that mean that I am fire 80% of the time? Which is exactly what me, as another self-identified "frost junkie", doesn't want to do?

The counter argument is also true. Suppose Manly has a fire raiding spec and an arcane raiding spec and that arcane has an advantage in mobility fights. When a mobility fight comes are you going to stick it out as fire or hit your arcane spec button? And if Blizzard decided for some odd reason to make 50%+ of the fights all about mobility (a common mage QQ) wouldn't that mean you are now an arcane mage? I think Xeno's point is that you (based on posting history) wouldn't care--you'd spec however the fight requires. You'd respec mid-fight if they let you and it helped with the encounter.

This paradigm completely dilutes the concept of character in WoW. It is exactly as Lhivera described it--a version of Quake where instead of "rail gun" and "shotgun" you have "fire" and "frost".

I think the only solution is to have the specs as close as possible in desirability on the different boss encounter types Blizzard intends to throw at us, the specs just achieve their results in different ways. That means fire and frost are about equal in a 6 minute fight; fire does it with massive crits, frost does it with elemental damage plus (some day) shatter combos. That means fire and frost are about equal on a 2 minute fight. Frost does it with cold snap and a continuous elemental; fire does it with...some adjustment that needs to be made to fire.

This may seem like "watering things down", but I don't see a better solution. Other than getting rid of the evil dual spec button and making respecing in general much more limited.

 

Enthorn

I will work off of this in discussing fire PvP. First, some background: This is my first character (and my only character, excluding my level 41 ret paladin who I've been neglecting to level). I leveled it as fire, and thus I never knew what anyone was talking about when they said frost is light years ahead of fire for leveling. There are a few things to keep in mind.

Frost relies on the chill component of frostbolt to keep your enemy at a distance. If the mob(s) reach you before they are dead, you can run away. Fire, on the other hand, relies on the pure nuking power of, well, fire. If it's still alive when it reaches you, you've done something wrong. This is the basic approach to the fire vs frost leveling spec. Now, I don't mean to imply that fire is supposed to kill everything in a few seconds. That's obviously not going to happen. Yes, you will use Dragon's Breath and Blast Wave and Frost Nova to keep your enemy at bay. But the main goal is to unleash as much damage as possible in as short amount of time as possible.

I applied the same philosophy to fire in PvP. Now, I quickly found that fire is irrelevant in arenas, in the sense that you will die so quickly you won't be able to do anything. Frost has substationally better survivability due to targets having their movement and melee attack speed chilled. On top of this, Ice Barrier is essentially ~1800 hitpoints every 30 seconds (in a 17.44 spec).

With fire, you simply do not have these luxuries. Melee is going to be constantly all over you, full force. The only thing slowing melee down is the occasional impact, which they will quickly become immune too due to diminishing returns. Thus, one needs to learn how to approach this from a different angle. The question with fire isn't, "How can I survive just as long to kill my opponent as I can with frost?" but is instead, "How can I kill my opponent before I die?"

As Arch has said as well, I can kill anyone 1v1. I can do many fights 1v2, and I have done 1v3 fights, depending on my opponents' gear. His talent tree is actually incredibly different from my current and planned builds. I currently use 0.61.0 which will progress into 1.70.0. However, I would consider 7.64.0 as well.

I actually do use fireball quite often in PvP. Actually, it's my main nuke of choice. There is absolutely no reason not to use it. What matters is being able to guage whether or not you'll be able to get a fireball off. The majority of my damage does come from fireball though, and always will.

I don't believe fire will be viable, at all, in arenas (which I hate to begin with), but for all arena purposes, I would return to frost with a 20.0.51 build. There's simply no question on the survivability compared to fire.

I will note that fire works for a few reasons. First, RNG is an absolute killer. Even against an opponent who has a 10% less chance to be crit from resilience, I'm still running with a 32% crit chance against them after scorch is factored in. That's 38% for scorch and fire blast. The hot streaks are all over the place, and pyroblasts absolutely destroy people (even more so when they crit). It's really just icing on the cake.

Second, there is adequate snaring and CC in fire. Between Blast Wave and Dragon's Breath, you have three of the best CCs in the game. A quite damaging AoE, plus a knock back, plus a 50% movement snare, and a very damaging 5 second disorient. Even at 3 seconds this was great, but now I'm actually starting to see players trinket out of the disorient. It takes them a while to realize it's 5 seconds though, so by the time they trinket it, the fireball + fire blast is already done.

Third, you still have the functionality of frost nova (and ice lance), counterspell, and polymorph. While every spec gets polymorph, naturally, it's incredibly more damaging for fire spec, due to fire having the hardest hitting ramp up spell (fireball, or pyroblast if you want to open up with that). I strictly use fireball for everything though. There is simply no reason to ever cast pyroblast while your opponent is frost novaed, sheeped, disoriented, etc. The reason being, it's not counting towards potential hot streak buffs, and you run the risk of any of those breaking early due to external factors.

Think of fire as a melee range spell spec. Your opponents will be close to you, at all times. This is where you are very deadly though. Fire has so many instant casts (Fire Blast, instant pyroblasts, Blast Wave, Dragon's Breath, Frost Nova + Ice Lance, even arcane explosion spam hits decently hard if you have many opponents). Sure, it's nice to open up with fireball from a comfortable 41 yard range, but that gap is going to close against melee targets, and it has to close against ranged targets (hunters especially). LoSing your opponent by running through them is key to fire.

This is also why Living Bomb is pretty grand. It can instantly pull an enemy into combat from 41 yards. Think of Living Bomb as your time frame. You should have your opponent dead or near death within those 12 seconds. By the time LB ticks to detonate, your opponent should be at an amount of health that they will die from the explosion (whether it crits or not).

You can effectively nuke players down in seconds with fire as well. Applying 2x scorch, then using Fireball + Fire Blast combinations, coupled with Dragon's Breath/Blast Wave to control them will ensure that they are constantly taking damage. After a Blast Wave, immediately Scorch and Fire Blast. Essentially you'll be wanting to use Fire Blast every 6 seconds, keeping Living Bomb up at all times, and Fireballing whenever you have the range and time to do so.

Against melee classes like rogues/warriors (paladins are more difficult because they'll waste bubble/lay on hands just to survive) and enhan shamans, combinations like fireball + fire blast -> dragon's breath -> fireball -> fire blast can be devastating, to the point where they could very well die if you include LB and score a hot streak proc in there. I have no problem nuking down nearly any healing class, with the most difficult one being a disc priest (due to pain suppression).

Remember, hot streak never acts like the statistics show you. It won't take you 8 casts to get a proc. You could very well do scorch -> scorch -> hot streak -> dragon's breath -> fireball -> fire blast -> hot streak and kill your opponent in 6 seconds (even without the dragon's breath, but again, I use this one every CD).

Fire is a lot of fun in PvP (battlegrounds, world PvP mainly) because you go into the fight knowing that anyone you meet, you can kill in a few seconds, provided you don't die first. But remember, if you're about to go, make sure you let that 1.5 second pyroblast fly before you depart.

 

Jonny_Monroe

I don't think you quite understood the point of my post. I'm operating under the premise that all 3 trees when finalised will perform at the desired level (Bliazzard's desired level, that is). If it boiled down to a choice where 65 fire talent increased damage by 1% and you had to take all of them to compete in meters, or where 5 fire talents evenly spread through the tree increased damage by a cumulative 65% and you had to only take those 5 to be competative; I'd rather have the latter. It leaves me with 66 talent points to point into pure filler/flavour and completely destroys the concept of a template spec; making your character far more unique.

To use an example from arcane: There is a lot of filler there. Very few talents are dedicated to raw damage increase but the talents that are are sufficient to bring arcane to its desired level (or will do once you get there). The result is a lot more float points in arcane that can go into flavour such as silence, better invis, armour, more spirit, better spell resistance, whatever.

Lets now say that arcane turns out to be doing 10% less damage than they want it to and they decide to bake 10% more damage into the arcane tree. Would you prefer they do what frost has and tag random 1% damage increases onto talents that don't need it in order to spread that 10% out? All that would achieve is forcing a template spec that includes those talents. If that 10% were baked onto things like arcane instability, arcane subtlety and netherwind presence then the current build gets its 'required' points and still has freedom to take flavour talents to suit your character.

If it boiled down to 2 competitive specs of (11/51/0)+9 versus (51/3/0)+17, I'd choose the latter simply because the larger amount of float points lets me play around with the option of changing from template mage #451 into my personal character.

OMNOMNOM.

 

ThingsFallApart

The Frost Crusade is getting out of hand.

Take a step back. 5-6 minute single-target dps fights are not the vast majority of the entire game. Full stop. The 5-6 minutes you spend on a particular boss is only a fraction of the time you'll even spend in the raid just getting to that boss. What I think you mean is these fights are the most important part of the game, which is debatable, but is certainly a point of view with which most readers of this forum will agree. But the vast majority of the time you spend in this game, even for the most hardcore of the hardcorps, will not be spent fighting bosses. For the purposes of the theorycraft in this thread we don't care, but for the purposes of designing classes, that must be taken into consideration.

I understand that in these threads we willfully ignore other aspects of the game to focus and refine methods for fighting bosses, but this argument is getting more and more frustrating for that reason. These classes are designed to be played under myriad situations. Single player farming, questing. Small content questing and dungeons. Single player pvp. Multiplayer pvp. Raid trash clearing. Raid boss encounters. Again, I understand that a single minded focus is necessary to the work that's done here, but the farther we drift out into our wishes for how classes are designed without considering every other aspect of the game, the less productive our arguments become.

Fire's "niche" of 5-6 minute single target dps is garbage in so many other aspects of the game, aspects that will make up the majority of our time /played. Frost's "niche" of survivability, control, and high burst for sub 3 minute single target dps is far more worthwhile for the majority of our time /played, but far from ideal for what we consider most significant, which is the end goal and pinnacle of our time /played, and yet is a mere fraction of it. Perfect? No. Balanced? Probably. An ideal won't be found without sacrificing the basic integrity of specs, classes, entire game design.

 

Zeldyrr

This idea has been brought up before but I don't like it's logical conclusion. By your argument, EVERY mage will spec frost for farming and grinding and trash. And EVERY mage will spec fire for bosses for superior damage. This means there are no frost mages or fire mages, there are only mages. They magically (excuse the pun) become fire or frost based on the content they are facing.

I think this is boring.

The argument is also flawed...only boss fights are challenging enough to force someone to respec. A fire mage could stay fire while farming and do just fine. Is frost a little safer/more efficient for farming? Yes. Enough to make it mandatory? No. The reverse is not true. A frost mage cannot stay frost on bosses if the DPS isn't there. Progression raiding is the only PvE activity that is "hard" enough that people will be asked to respec for that 5-10% extra. And since dual specs make going frost-->fire free and instantaneous, there is no reason not to.

So in the end you get fire mages staying fire 100% of the time and frost mages having to switch out of the gimp spec on boss fights. This isn't a frost crusade...it is simple asking for balance and fairness.

Edit: Johnny_Monroe makes some good comments to my last point here, below. Most of them have been hashed out a number of times (frost has more survivability on boss fights). Those points have counter arguments but bringing them up again doesn't really add to this discussion. I did want to comment on this one statement though:

May I ask why? So there is a mobility based fight, you are in your niche, and everyone appreciates what you bring to the fight. Then you get to patchwerk. You have a button that will make you fire. It's free. It's instantaneous. It would make you do 10% more damage on patchwerk. Why won't you help your guild out and press that button? If you had a hunter that refused to press the revive pet button before a boss fight, wouldn't you kick him from the raid?

Don't get me wrong, I think I know why. I've been raiding frost from ZG to SWP. I refused to go with rolling ignites because it seemed like a bug to me. I figured out a way to make frost work on Hydross and Raz. But even I see the handwriting on the wall. Even in a semi-hardcore, semi-casual raiding guild, how can I justify staying frost on boss fights where frost has no advantage? Arguing that I am better on other fights is no longer an argument. I can pick the spec before the fight--why pick frost? And if the nature of raid encounters is as Xeno suggests, I'm going to be fire 90% of the time and frost 10%. That is the concern.

 

Jonny_Monroe

On the other side of this if frost deals equal damage to fire then there is no reason to touch fire on boss fights. Frost has an easier time on mana, and better survivability. Fire actively diminishes survival for DPS (PWF). Frost is also better as fights become more complicated due to a simpler cast cycle that doesn't suffer as much from target switching or breaking DPS to leave the fire.

I'm arcane and nothing short of deleting the tree will change that; but if I out-damage fire mages on patchwerk I'll be the first on the forum telling people arcane is OP or fire is broken. I know my niché and I'm happy with it, and I'm good at it. Fire's niche is so incredibly specialised compared to frost and arcane that it would be a diservice to people who choose to play it for it to not flat out win on its niche.

Addendum: Before someone says 'But Ice Barrier costs a GCD, we already sacrifice damage for it!' No, you don't. If you're taking damage then you're suffering pushback. If you're suffering pushback then Ice Barrier pays for its own GCD by removing that concern.

OMNOMNOM.

 

◊ manly

Before I start, let it be said that what I am doing is against the forum rules. I will multi-quote so that I can avoid making like 5 different posts.

Your post resumes well my thoughts. As much as I value boss dps, I do realize the many pitfalls of fire spec. Namely, it does fairly bad on any solo content, any 5 mans, any 10 mans and any trash pack. Thats quite a lot of scenarios. This is why I do strongly put an emphasis on making sure fire is better somewhere. It also means that, since frost happens to do far better for solo content or trash pack (thanks to frostbite/snares and mana conserns), it also ought to drop the ball somewhere else. Bosses seems like the intended direction.


1% would definitely be the extreme max. But I do believe there should be a dps cost associated with a raid utility. Don't get me wrong -- we both agree the utility is abysmally low as far as raiding goes. It is, however, quite valuable for non-raiding content. Maybe 0.5% would be more what I have in mind. As I said, the number isn't really what I care about. We either agree there should be a cost to be paid, in terms of dps, or we don't. If there is to be one, then we both agree from the get-go the number ought to be small.


Well, I agree that if you spend not a single utility talent you ought to have good dps. However, as I said earlier, bosses are just a fraction of the game. But lets imagine here for a second that you could truly make a frost build with zero utility talent. Every talent is a dps-booster or dpm-booster. If you could do that, and that fire could do the same, then both specs should have the same dps. However, and this is the crucial part, you need to spend an equal number of pure dps-increasing talents for both trees to have the same dps. If there are talents like PWF or like Burnout, talents where you pay an additional cost, then that additional cost allows you to go over-budget talent balance wise. Now I know that many will go 'hmmm PWF is clearly not over-budget!'. And this is where I also disagree. I believe that PWF is meant to be over-budget. Since 1% boost per point with an extra +1% damage taken is clearly under-budget, that means something else makes up for it. That 'something' is that PWF itself is over-budget. Let me put it in more simplistic terms to better illustrate my point. Lets say that fire is meant to be balanced around PWF not existing. But if you do take PWF, then that extra 3% damage is your 'over-budget' that the tree is not supposed to have in its balanced state. I do strongly believe that PWF is a talent that is meant to allow fire spec to deal more dps than it is otherwise intended for the whole tree. It doesn't means a full 3% over. It means that, to me, if the talent was meant to be balanced, it would be a flat 3% dps increase, with no other cost. Then the fire dps would assume that 3% as being an integral part of its balance, which means, in simplistic terms, that fire would do 3% less dps than it currently does when you do take the talent. The fact that it has a downside means the upside is that it allows fire spec to have 'dps' be its 'niche'/intangible.

Sacrificial talents (better illustrated by burnout) allow overbudgeting the talent itself. If fire/frost had only dps talents, then yes, we agree their dps should be equal in almost every scenario for as long as they spend the same amount of talent points. But then, if fire spec needs to sacrifice more in order to get the same dps as frost, then whats the point ? So what I am saying is, for every sacrifice being made, those sacrifice also needs to be balanced. You argue those sacrifice should give more 'intangibility advantage' (more mobility dps for example), and I don't necessarily disagree. However, those sacrifices are baked into dps talents. It would be awkward to pay the burnout cost on burnout, have burnout give 25% more damage total (instead of 50%), but then have burnout somehow give more mobility dps ? I'm not against it, its just the design doesn't seem to match your view, even though I am somewhat impartial as to how things are balanced.


I am impartial as far as how balance is achieved. As long as it is maintained. We both agree dps should be linked with intangibles. Whether intangibles are balanced around the dps or whether the dps is balanced around the intangibles shouldn't matter. In my view, its a matter of simplicity of balancing how you do it. I would prefer if talents were balanced primarily for PVE, but doing so would make PVP balancing an order of magnitude harder to do. As a result, it makes more logical sense to balance talents around PVP and then adapt PVE to match the talents. In both cases the end result is somewhat the same, both of them with their respective bias. Balancing around pvp makes more sense since its less trouble, but hey -- its equally valid to do it the other way around, its just more trouble. In the same veins, I don't really mind how it is done.


Remember what I said about nobody agreeing on a scenario ? I am inclined to agree that most of what we have seen so far has mostly a bias towards fire spec, as far as bosses are concerned. However, I also consider strongly non-boss content. Which happens to amount to an awful lot of cases. Solo farming as fire spec really kind of sucks a lot. Ignites not delivering their damage, lack of snares (resulting in more hits taken -> more drinking time), horrible mana efficiency (-> more drinking time). Then theres also frostbite I somewhat value highly, but this is more of a personal opinion. How much should solo content be valued balance-wise vs bosses is anyones guess. I don't know the answer to that myself. I do believe there is much to be considered in those scenarios as well rather than dismissing them.

Log on with different model:
1- Create a character of the desired model. Log on/off.
2- At character selection screen, select your actual character; mouseover the new, desired model character, and hold down left click; hit enter and release left click at the same time.
bug Arcane Potency only applies to the first Arcane Missile bolt.